--- title: Jan Ingenhousz, Father of Photosynthesis, Gets Google Doodle description: Dutch scientist Jan Ingenhousz, who would have turned 287 today, is best known for discovering how plants turn sunlight into energy. canonical: https://time.com/5055533/jan-ingenhousz-google-doodle-photosynthesis-plants/ author: Eli Meixler article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-12-08T04:07:58.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-12T23:44:25.000Z og:title: Google Doodle Honors Jan Ingenhousz Father of Photosynthesis og:description: The Dutch scientist unlocked the secret life of plants og:url: https://time.com/5055533/jan-ingenhousz-google-doodle-photosynthesis-plants/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd293ee418bc5d439/6988f449ab6d7785766b0ee4/jan-ingenhouszs-287th-birthday-5733919419793408-2x.png?branch=production&width=758&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 758 og:image:height: 426 og:image:alt: jan-ingenhouszs-287th-birthday-5733919419793408-2x og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Google Doodle Honors Jan Ingenhousz Father of Photosynthesis twitter:description: The Dutch scientist unlocked the secret life of plants twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd293ee418bc5d439/6988f449ab6d7785766b0ee4/jan-ingenhouszs-287th-birthday-5733919419793408-2x.png?branch=production&width=758&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Jan Ingenhousz, Father of Photosynthesis, Celebrated With Google Doodle > Sponsored content. 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Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-brief-2026q3/newsletters?i=fe877286-6ebf-404b-baae-7203bd623e71&cr=time-nl-brief-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Google Makes its Doodles [Watch (HLS stream): How Google Makes its Doodles](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/upF0qp1E.m3u8) (3:23)  _Published 2018-07-07. Our videographer went to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California to meet some of the designers and coders who create the special, clever variations on the Google.com logo known as_ by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Updated: Dec 12, 2023 11:44 PM UTCPublished: Dec 8, 2017 4:07 AM UTC  Google celebrated Jan Ingenhousz's 287th birthday on Dec. 8, 2017. Google celebrated Jan Ingenhousz's 287th birthday on Dec. 8, 2017. Google Doodle by [Eli Meixler](https://time.com/author/eli/) ## Eli Meixler Updated: Dec 12, 2023 11:44 PM UTCPublished: Dec 8, 2017 4:07 AM UTC Today’s [Google Doodle](http://time.com/tag/google-doodle/) celebrates another important figure in the history of science: Jan Ingenhousz, the 18th century Dutch chemist who “[sprouted a flowering understanding](https://www.google.com/doodles/jan-ingenhouszs-287th-birthday) of the secret life of plants,” according to Google. Ingenhousz, who would have turned 287 today, was also a physician and a biologist, but his best-known contribution to scientific knowledge is the discovery of photosynthesis: the process by which plants convert light into energy. Ingenhousz began his career as a physician, developing an early interest in innoculation and immunizing hundreds of Londoners against the threat of smallpox. His aptitude caught the attention of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, who brought Ingenhousz to Vienna to inoculate the entire royal Habsburg line. Ingenhousz didn’t limit himself to the study of medicine, and it was his unraveling the secrets of photosynthesis that ultimately made his fame. While it was already known that plants interact with atmospheric gases, it was Ingenhousz who first noticed that plants produce oxygen when exposed to light — tipping him off to the process of photosynthesis, whereby plants harness light to convert water and carbon dioxide into sugar, which plants use as energy, and oxygen, which fills the air we breathe. Ingenhousz also made contributions to the study of electricity, thermal conduction, and particle motion, which brought him into correspondence with some of the other scientific luminaries of his day, including [Benjamin Franklin](http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2012113,00.html) and Henvy Cavendish. He died England in 1799, but whether you’re bent over a biology textbook or enjoying a sunny day in the park, you can thank Jan Ingenhousz for helping us understand how the plants around us work. ## Transcript >> The Doodle team was able to meet Ira Glass from This American Life, and he was just meeting us for fun. I guess, I'm not even sure why he was here, but we talked about potentially collaborating and they thought that it'd be fun to collaborate with us on Valentine's Day, so I took the lead on this project. >> We do Valentine's Day pretty much every year, and we've done your typical like lovebirds and, you know, flowers and things like that. But Ira and his team are awesome. >> They were able to pull stories that they have collected over the years, they've recorded new stories for us, and they're all about love in all different respects of the word. They sent us maybe 8 or 10 stories and they're all really fun and really sweet. >> The stories run the [ unk ]. There is a story about middle school love. >> I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer and she walks up to me. >> There is a story about a new bride who's in doubt that she made a mistake. >> My husband, me and I, we're just so worried, his face I could tell. I said, " Where he could be ," you know, and I-- and I called the police because I thought he got lost or something happened. >> When I first got the audio from Ira, my co- worker and I listened to it together and we wrote down bullet points of where we wanted to have a little drawing come up. >> One of my favorite stories, it involves middle schoolers. We're titling it, " Puppy Love" so true to the title, I just-- I just drew everyone as a dog. >> Each stories are-- containing a little candy heart. >> And when you click on it, the heart will flip, the audio will play and you will also see the images that we've drawn to accompany the phrases. So, now we are all going to brainstorms together because we need the creative side and we also need the technical side to tell us what is possible and what isn't possible. For this one, it's a pretty conservative on the interactive side, because we didn't want to overshadow the audio. When I first started, they were no engineers on the team, we only did static doodles, but since then, we've started doing more animated stuff, more interactive work, and for that we needed a dedicated team. >> Some of our most like ambitious to those have come from engineers that are just incredibly talented and spare similar time for our projects. >> Sometimes the illustrators will come up with an idea that is way too wacky and just not possible yet. The technology hasn't been invented, but sometimes we're too conservative and it's great to have the engineers there to tell us that we can actually be way wackier with our ideas. The relationship with my engineer on this was to just keep my files size at a reasonable capacity, I was getting a little bit ambitious with how many frames I wanted to draw and my engineers said, " Hey, you need to double it ." >> We tried to do as many doodles as we possibly can. We're a pretty small team, relative to how many audiences are out there [ unk ], but yeah, we-- you never know what you're gonna get. 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